The five numbers a SaaS founder should know before the 10th

Most SaaS founders I work with are not short on data. They are short on the five numbers that actually tell them whether the month went well. They have a dashboard full of charts, a Stripe account, a bank balance, and a vague sense that things are fine or not fine.

Here is the short list I would want if I ran a SaaS company. All five can be produced by the 10th of the month, and none of them require a finance team.

1. Net new MRR, not just MRR

Total MRR is a comfort number. It goes up almost every month in a growing business, which is why it hides problems. Net new MRR is the honest version: new MRR, plus expansion, minus contraction, minus churn. If your total MRR is up $2,000 but $1,800 of that is one new logo and you lost $1,400 to churn, you have a leak, not a growth story.

Track it as one line per month for twelve months. The shape of that line tells you more than any single month ever will.

2. Gross margin, calculated on the right costs

Gross margin is revenue minus the cost of delivering the service. For a SaaS business that means hosting, third-party APIs, support staff, and any contractor who touches delivery. It does not mean your own salary, your ads, or your office.

The mistake I see most often is putting everything in one bucket and calling the result profit. When every cost is an operating expense, you cannot tell whether the product is fundamentally healthy or whether you are simply selling dollars for ninety cents.

3. Cash collected, versus revenue recognised

Revenue is an accounting idea. Cash is what pays people. In a subscription business the two diverge constantly: annual plans paid up front create deferred revenue, and that money sits on your balance sheet as an obligation, not as profit you can spend.

This is the single most common way a profitable-looking SaaS company runs out of money. They book a $12,000 annual plan in January, feel rich, spend it, and then have to deliver twelve months of service with no further cash coming in.

4. Runway, in months, at current burn

Runway is cash divided by average monthly net burn. Use a three-month average, not last month, because one big invoice or one big bill will lie to you.

I like to see two runway numbers: one assuming no new sales, and one assuming sales continue at the trailing average. The gap between them is the real measure of how much your sales engine is holding the company up.

5. The one number that would change your decisions

Every founder has a number that, if it moved, would change what they do next. It might be trial-to-paid conversion, or average contract value, or the percentage of revenue coming from your largest three clients. Pick it deliberately, write it down, and look at it every month.

If you cannot name that number, that is the finding. It usually means the reporting you have is built for a bank or an investor rather than for you.

How to get these by the 10th

Three things have to be true. Your books have to be closed on a schedule rather than when someone gets to them. Your revenue has to be recorded by month of service, not month of payment. And your chart of accounts has to separate cost of delivery from operating expense.

None of that is exotic. It is just bookkeeping done with the reporting in mind. If your current setup cannot produce these five numbers by the 10th, that is worth fixing before you spend another dollar on growth.